It is important to review the COPD Management Goals. To begin, in order to make certain a patient has the disease it must be diagnosed with spirometry.

We have a definition of the disease that tells us it is preventable, so we have to help our patients reduce risk factors by smoking cessation, by immunization, by reduction of any exposure that can precipitate symptoms.

This is a progressive disease, so we need not only to reduce symptoms acutely every four-to-six hours, we need to reduce complications. We need to reduce progression of the disease, which we are achieving today with pharmacotherapy. That is why guidelines for treatment of this disease recommend long-acting bronchodilators as your first line of therapy when you diagnose a patient with symptomatic COPD. Independent of the severity of the disease, long-acting bronchodilators should be the mainstay of therapy. Additional therapy can be added if the patient gets worse or symptoms fail to improve. With pharmacotherapy in combination with other interventions like pulmonary rehabilitation we are going to change this disease, and I am very excited about these changes.

There is so much we can do for a patient. There is so much we can identify in diagnosis. We have pharmacotherapy, interventions, smoking cessation. We have the tools to change a disease that for years we were forced to sit and watch progress. Now we can intervene, we can impact the patient’s life. We have the tools, we know the risk factors, and we have the pharmacotherapy and now we can stop this disease which has caused so much impairment.